Promotional Campaign Duration and Word-of-Mouth in Solar Panel Adoption
70 Pages Posted: 21 Aug 2023 Last revised: 30 Nov 2023
Date Written: November 28, 2023
Abstract
Intensive marketing campaigns can be used to increase awareness, consideration, purchase, and word-of-mouth (WOM) of pro-social products. With expanded interest and belief in how social norms and spillovers might be leveraged to combat climate change, it is critical to understand how campaigns designed to leverage such peer effects can be best designed. In this paper, we study the role of campaign duration in solar photovoltaic adoption using a large-scale field experiment, in which we randomly assign communities to campaigns with shorter durations, increasing the marketing intensity to maintain the same total resources per campaign. We find that the longer campaigns generate more WOM and lead to more adoption post-campaign, despite a comparable number of installations during the campaigns. The shorter campaigns led to 22.6 fewer installations per town in the two years after the campaigns concluded, leading to a cost per acquisition of $4,367 versus $2,029 in the longer campaigns, the latter being lower than installers' self-reported acquisition costs, and the former being substantially higher.
Keywords: Durable good adoption, promotional campaign duration, word-of-mouth, field experiments, pro-social marketing
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation